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Too Much Structured Knowledge Hurts Your Creativity

As has been pointed out many times, too much knowledge is a bad thing.

Why?

Research by John-Erik Mathisen & Jan Ketil Arnulf of the BI Norwegian Business School from among other studies shows that graduates with a Masters in Business Administration demonstrate LESS creativity than non-MBA graduates.

The reason is simple: our educational system focuses on training students in logically linear thought processes, while creativity and innovation involves lateral thinking, seeing connections between seemingly unconnected ideas.

For example, before Einstein linked them, physicists from the time of Newton saw little if no relationship between energy, E, and mass, M. In his 1905 paper on optics Einstein showed the specific relationship in his equation E=MC2, the relationship being the speed of light squared. Big idea, perhaps the biggest of the twentieth century.

Had Einstein relied on his knowledge of existing science, he would have missed the relationship. He literally thought outside the box, which by the way, is known by researchers to be a great way to foster your creativity.

Get in a box, work on a problem. Then get out of the box and work. You'll be more creative. (The same phenomena occurs if you're in a cubicle. Get out of the cubicle while you're working on a problem.)

Of course, as an entrepreneur or prospective business owner, there are certain things you must know. according to tracking studies by Dun & Bradstreet in their now discontinued Business Failure Surveys there are two reasons businesses fail. As we've pointed out in other posts, the two most common causes of business failure are:

But, back to this study from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management; here is the full press release on the study with a link to the full study.

* * * * *

Ideas rise from chaos:

Information structure and creativity.

Structure organizes human activities and help us understand
the world with less effort, but it can be the killer of creativity, concludes a
study from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

While most management research has supported the idea that
giving structure to information makes it easier to cope with its complexity and
boosts efficiency, the paper says that comes as a double-edged sword.

"A hierarchically organized information structure may
also have a dark side," warns Yeun Joon Kim, a PhD student who co-authored
the paper with Chen-Bo Zhong, an associate professor of organizational
behaviour and human resource management at the Rotman School.

The researchers showed in a series of experiments that
participants displayed less creativity and cognitive flexibility when asked to
complete tasks using categorized sets of information, compared to those asked
to work with items that were not ordered in any special way. Those in the
organized information group also spent less time on their tasks, suggesting
reduced persistence, a key ingredient for creativity.

The researchers ran three experiments. In two, study
participants were presented with a group of nouns that were either organized
into neat categories or not, and then told to make as many sentences as they
could with them.

The third experiment used LEGO® bricks. Participants were
asked to make an alien out of a box of bricks organized by colour and shape or,
in a scenario familiar to many parents, out of a box of unorganized bricks.
Participants in the organized category were prohibited from dumping the bricks
out onto a table.

The findings may have application for leaders of
multi-disciplinary teams, which tend to show inconsistent rates of innovation,
perhaps because team members may continue to organize their ideas according to
functional similarity, area of their expertise, or discipline.

"We suggest people put their ideas randomly on a white
board and then think about some of their connections," says Kim. Our
tendency to categorize information rather than efficiency itself is what those
working in creative industries need to be most on guard about, the researchers
say.

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